The audacity of dreams

I am going to buy an OUYA.

It may not be tomorrow. It may not be this weekend. But before the calendar year has expired, I will be purchasing an OUYA. I am aware that it is not running on anything remotely near top of the line hardware. I am aware that many of the games it features will become available on my Kobo. In fact, it is both possible and depressingly likely that at the end of the day my PS3 will simply feature more, better games.

I am going to buy an OUYA because I like dreams.

Tomb Raider, will critically popular, sold 3.4 million copies and this was still not enough for Square Enix to turn a profit. Hitman barely broke even. Some estimates peg MW3 as costing 100 million dollars to produce. This model that every game has to have unbelievable hype and sell like gangbusters is not going to work for very long. Rising dev costs will tank how many games can be made, and the need for guaranteed sales is going to kill creativity. The AAA model is going to kill gaming far faster than it will save it. I mean, look at me. The most fun I had in the last year was easily with either Space Marine or Transformers: Fall of Cybertron. Neither game was particularly huge and neither game stood a chance in hell of matching the CoD marketing juggernaut, but god-damn they just cooked.

This is why I want to throw my money behind OUYA. Games don't have to be marketable or sexy, they just need to be fun. How they're fun doesn't matter, and the mechanics that make them fun are probably independent of the processing power required to generate a photo-realistic city in real time. If this crazy experiment works, devs will have a chance for creativity to matter again. They will have a chance to nurture a product from beginning to end, at a normal person pace, instead of the development hell behind every major title now.

It will not replace my PS3. It will never compete with the big boys. That expectation is foolhardy and unrealistic, and anyone who resorts to that as an argument against the OUYA should be struck with an open hand. What it will do, hopefully, is provide me with an easy to use outlet to find some fun, simple games. Something for me to get into if I don't want to drop 60$ and 20 hours. Maybe I only want to throw down 10 dollars and 5 hours, whatever, hopefully it with fill that niche in my gaming hierarchy.

And, if it doesn't, well I guess I still have my 3DS.